Steven Gilligan
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Steven Gilligan
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Steven died in May 2007, and we really miss him. Born in Yorkshire, but quickly heading for the big city lights of Brighton, Steven first full length novel was Elsewhere, and he also produced the delectable short flash film, My Name is Alan, as a treat for the consumers of all things Silver Age. He took some time to consider the direction of his second novel, after perhaps something overenthusiastically embracing and then abandoning the idea for Alpha.one, but ultimately did not complete one.. During his long, long life (estimates of his age
in 1999 ranged from 26 to an unlikely 302), Steven found many different ways to
express his artistic intent, even from his earliest days as a child in West
Yorkshire. For example, together with frequent co-conspirator John Greenwood, he
was the publisher of an illicit school newsletter, slipped surreptitiously into
the pupil
Upon attending secondary school, Steven wasted no time in enrolling as a school librarian. As every reader of HP Lovecraft knows, librarians have access to secret knowledge, hidden books and things that men were not meant to know! However, in this he was disappointed, as Oakbank School library surprisingly contained neither the damnable Unaussprechlichen Kulten of Von Junzt nor (amazingly for such a well-stocked learning resource centre) the sinister De Vermis Mysteriis of Ludvig Prinn. At 16, Steven made a short appearance in a Tanita
Tikaram video, Little Sister
Leaving Town, as a dancer in a turn-of-the-century village hall. The video
was shown once on ITV’s The Chart Show, but has rarely
At the age of 17, he thought, for an instant, that there might be some money to be made out of gullible fools willing to believe in astrology, and, for a price, fooled them into accepting the product of a ZX Spectrum astrology program as the result of hours of hard work and occult skill. Later, on an impulse, he and the Silver Age maestro himself, Stephen William Theaker, decided to expand on this interesting beginning and set themselves up as ghost hunters, putting a card in the window of a magic shop half-way along a long narrow street in Haworth (former home of the Bronte sisters) – reputedly the most haunted street in England. Unfortunately, the ghost hunting never took off, largely thanks to Theaker, despite his literary brashness, being unmitigatedly frightened of the dark. Still 17, Steven also spent a period as prime mover with the rock group, Master Zangpan and the Mechanical Housewife – the name of the band inspired the characters that would later appear in more than one Silver Age novel. They recorded one short tape, the infamous Empty Bag. It featured such classic songs as “Teakettle” and “Kevin is Very Dull”. They went on to play a single concert at Double Six, a pub for under-18s... The concert was a roaring success, with door takings being sufficient to pay the band’s entry into a nightclub to celebrate. The group was described in the Keighley News as “a cross between Frank Sidebottom and the Pixies”. The band was offered another gig, at the wedding of a young army recruit, but by then Steven had decided to follow other dreams, and the rest of the band were left to fend for themselves. Steven also played with a less successful band, The Lost Teakettles of Atlantis, for which he recited beat poetry over backing music cobbled together from KLF b-sides. Later in life, after a brief flirtation with art school and the power of Satan, Gilligan toyed with the idea of moving to Canada, only to realise that his future lay in the south. There, from his base in sunny Brighton, he initiated or played a key role in such projects as New Words magazine, Cartonia Orange 7, Serious Intent (ISBN 0 904733 94 7), an anthology of poetry from QueenSpark Market Books, and, of course, most importantly and recently, the wonder and magic that is Silver Age Books! Once, while walking down the street in Brighton, he thought he heard Bobby Gillespie, of Primal Scream fame, call him an unpleasant name. One other time, he believed that Gary Clail, of the On-U Sound System, was chatting up his girlfriend.
Some of those seminal short stories are now available on this site: Frank and the Hermaphrodites and Something is Always Missing. For a brief but brilliant period in 1992 he drummed and vocalised as one of The Theakers. January 2001, and Steven’s many fans flocked to his spectacular and unusual website: www.geocities.com/stevengilligan, which featured poetry and a dancing Gilligan! (Also of interest to Gilliphiles will be the Homegrown Goodness site, on which, among much other hilarious work, there is a portrait of Steven Gilligan at a book signing attended only by giant spiders – see it here.) During April 2002, insane scientists worked on predicting the likely appearance of Steven Gilligan in the year 2027, just in case he disappeared from public view, like Howard Hughes or Elvis. See the fruit of their researches here.
During 2005 a new phase began in Gilligan's writing life, with the simultaneous publication of The Ephemeral Homunculus, the story of a little man, and Excelsior, the story of a big robot. See the bibliography below for further details. He also had published in that year a short comic, collecting assorted hilarious strips, such as the Bored Fish and the Ill People, Gilligan's Thigh-Land #1. In 2006 the publication began in TQF of Helen and Her Magic Cat, a brilliant comic strip. I can’t quite remember when I first met Steven Gilligan. It might have been at the school library, where I soon joined him, John Greenwood and Sam Dixon as a student librarian. It might have been after someone suggested I look in on a writers’ group (made up mainly of the same people) that was meeting at lunchtimes. Or I might just have met him in the hall at lunchtime one day. However it happened, it was a lunchtime, and he made an immediate impact on me, and we quickly became involved in a dozen silly projects together – we performed sketches at the school shows, started a band (Master Zangpan and the Mechanical Housewife), tried to start a marbles revival, sold trumped-up horoscopes, offered a ghost hunting service, created New Words, launched Silver Age Books, published our novels, and most recently we created November Spawned and Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, to both of which he made notable contributions.
He gave me confidence in whatever I wanted to do, gave me a kick up the butt when I needed it, taught me how the importance of the punk rock spirit in everyday life, and did a brilliant job as the best man at my chaotic wedding. Anyway, he’s gone now – he died at the end of May in 2007. For the rest of my life it’ll feel like something’s missing. My daughter’s lost someone who would have been the best “bad influence” uncle a kid could ask for (and he introduced her to Peppa Pig, Mini Moni and The Bear in the Big Blue House, as well as giving her about fifty brilliant toys and books), and I’ve lost a best friend. He was also the best gift-giver I've ever known – birthdays and Christmases are going to really suck now.We have some of his Helen and Her Magic Cat strips in hand, so his presence will be felt directly in the magazine for a little while yet, and indirectly for as long as it lasts. If we can, we’ll also put together a new collection of his work at some point. I think he would have appreciated the way I found out that he was a goner. Sitting in the lobby of his tower block, waiting for news from the police who had gone to open and investigate his room, I heard someone, a cleaner I think, yelling, “Have you heard? Someone on the first floor has kicked the bucket!” I couldn't help laughing, because that’s exactly how Steven would have wanted it. – SWT.Novel Elsewhere (2002) Read a sample! / Order from Amazon Novellas The Indigo Skies of Home: Sabaku (2005) TQF #5 The Ephemeral Homunculus (2005) NS #1 #2 #3 #4 Short Fiction Cartonia Orange (1994) (co-author) Stories Olroch and Raymond's Sea Journey on Wheels (1995) New Words #1 The King George Theatre (1995) New Words #2 Something Is Always Missing (1995) New Words #3 The Mouth of a Road (c.1999) Read on Steven's website Poetry Serious Intent (contributor) / Order from Amazon SHORT FILMS My Name Is Alan (2001) Movies Lucy (2001) Download from Steven's website Coffee in the Morning (2002) Movies Comics and Cartoons Love Kills (1992) Cartoons Gilligan People Who Like T.V. (1992) Cartoons Gilligan Gilligan's Thigh-Land #1 (2005) Crazy Ivan (2005/6) TQF #8 #9 #10 Helen and Her Magic Cat (2006-) TQF #12 #13 #14 #16 #15 #17 #18 #19 #20 #21 #22 (parts four and five were published in the wrong order) Illustration Catching Stories: Voices from the Brighton Fishing Community (some interior illustrations) (1996) (Queenspark Press) Interior artwork (2007-) TQF #13 MUSIC Master Zangpan and the Mechanical Housewife The Lost Teakettles of Atlantis
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Master of all
things Silver Age!
registers
for unwitting teachers to read out...
The
short stories produced during his first years in Brighton were written during
long midnight shifts as night porter in various hotels, so if you ever passed
through that city of the sun, only to be frighted by an ominous scribbling
emanating from the darkness, you now know whence it came! While working at one
of those hotels, he changed a shower curtain for The Commodores and shared a
pint with Geoff Boycott. Even once those long hours in silent hotels became a
thing of the past, the midnight eyes, the wary ears, ever listening for the
sound of scurrying rats, remained, leaving Gilligan an artist ever ready to
attend to the darker parts of the Silver Age...
